Glossary: Internet of Things

Term coined by MIT Auto ID Center for things "talking" electronically to things over the Internet. The Internet of Things

The most ambitious concept in RFID emanates from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Auto-ID Center, now managed by EPC Global, owned by the standards bodies UCC and EAN now renamed GS1. It envisages most barcodes and more being replaced by one cent smart labels with one meter range, read-only and with 96 bits or so of data, i.e. very primitive and therefore very cheap tags. It is speculated that this could improve Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) supply chain parameters by a factor of ten such as time to market, stocks, shrinkage, recall efficiency, premature expiry, theft and counterfeits. It could provide many new consumer benefits such as the microwave oven that automatically cooks tagged food correctly and the automated recycling of the resultant trash. As yet, this objective is unrealistic on the scale of tens of trillions of tags a year that is envisaged because, without printed transistor circuits:

No one offers such a smart label or the necessary sophisticated $10 interrogator, and the envisaged sales involve payment for the disposable smart labels, systems and services involved of something close to $200 billion yearly. This is the Gross National Product (GNP) of a medium-sized nation.

See EPC and EPCglobal